The Glimpsed Thing

For those that know me well, and consider me an irredeemable, existential atheist, smouldering as I leave church, this piece may come as a surprise.  But it shouldn’t.  It was always there and is present in the absurd, the space between, the yearning I have for more, for deeper, for the profound. I admire your faith, even if I cannot always share it.  If you ever read this, I hope it resonates with you. I wrote it for you.

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There is an elusive something that will not be named. Every tradition that has tried to name it, God, the Tao, Brahman, the Sublime, has known, even in the naming, that the name is wrong or partial. The word is a finger pointing at the moon, and we are forever in danger of studying the finger.

Barbara Ehrenreich, stalking her god through decades of rational resistance, did not find what she was looking for in “Living with a Wild God”. She found something else entirely, an encounter that ambushed her in adolescence and spent the rest of her life demanding to be understood. A transcendence.  What erupted in her was not comfort. It was contact, a meeting. The universe, briefly, wonderfully and terrifyingly, stared back. And the most honest thing she could say about it was that it was real, more real, perhaps, than anything she could prove.

This is the elusive thing that will not stay in its box.

It appears in the gospels, of course. It appears in the water becoming wine, in the man who walks on the sea, in the body broken and the blood poured out. In the holy resurrection. But it appeared long before any of that, in the whirlwind from which God spoke to Job not with answers but with questions so vast they were their own kind of annihilation: Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? The mystics knew that the point was not the doctrine. The point was the moment when the ground gives way beneath you and something enormous is suddenly, briefly, present, sometimes seen out of the corner of your eye.  But felt. Deeply. In the core of your being.

But it appears, too, without any of the scaffolding.

It appears when you are standing at the edge of the sea at dusk and something opens, not in you exactly, but between you and what you are looking at. When the light on the water is doing something that light on water has done for four billion years and you feel, without being able to say why or rationalise at all, that you are being addressed. That you are being included in something that was there before you and will be there long after.

And that you somehow fit.

It appears on the summit of a mountain when exhaustion has burned away the self-consciousness and what is left is very simple: breath, rock, sky, the strange fact of being alive at all. It appears in forests. Hopkins knew it, the dearest freshness deep down things, and knew also that whatever it was, it charged the world like an electrical current, present in the grain of a ploughed field, in the dragonfly's wing, in the throat of a bird. He forced it into the cage of Catholicism because he needed it contained. But it overflowed the cage every time.

And then there are other people.

In Camus’ “La Peste” (yes, sorry, him again dear reader), the swim between Rieux and Tarrou is one of the most extraordinary passages in twentieth century literature precisely because nothing happens in it and yet so much. Two exhausted and very different men, ground down by months of plague and death and the mechanical grinding of duty, slip away from the city one night and swim together in the sea.

That is all.

No revelation. No words of consequence. Just the cold water, the dark sky, the rhythm of two bodies moving through the same element, separated by belief but profoundly together. And yet Camus gives it a weight that the book's entire moral argument has been building toward. Because in that silence, in that shared physical fact of being alive and moving through the world together, something passes between them that all their conversations about resistance and meaning and God could not achieve. They are, for those few minutes, at one, with each other and with something larger than either of them. The sea does not care about the plague. The stars do not know about the plague. And the two men, briefly, are part of that indifference, and find in it not coldness but release. A kind of grace. A moment before they will be broken apart by Tarrou’s death.

This is solidarity as sacrament. Not the solidarity of ideology or even of shared suffering, but the solidarity of two consciousnesses briefly recognising, without needing to say so, that they are made of the same thing. That the boundary between them is, at some level, temporary and surmountable.

Camus understood this in the way that only a man who had refused every consolation could understand it.

At the end of “La Peste”, when the plague lifts from Oran, and the gates open and the reunions happen on the streets, Rieux watches, he who has seen everything, who has kept his accounts, who has refused to look away.  And what he feels is not triumph and not faith and certainly not the grace of any God. It is solidarity. The sheer stubborn fact of human beings in the darkness, reaching for each other, tending each other, refusing to abandon each other to the nothing.

And is that not its own form of the sacred? The hand held in the terminal ward. The meal cooked for the grieving. The stranger who stops and sees you. The friend who does not look away. In these moments something passes between people that is not merely social, not merely useful, something that feels, in the feeling of it, like a glimpse of what we are really here for.

Like love, which is perhaps the oldest and most available portal into whatever this is.

Because love is the clearest case. It is irrational in the most beautiful sense; it exceeds every account you could give of it. You can describe the neurochemistry and the evolutionary pressures and the social function and when you are done the thing itself will be sitting there, unreduced, looking at you. Anyone who has loved knows that they have briefly occupied a different order of reality. That they have seen through the ordinary world into something it is pointing at.

The mystics called it unio mystica. The Romantics called it the Sublime. Physicists, when they are being honest, talk about the strangeness of consciousness in a universe that had no business producing it. What they are all circling is the same thing: the suspicion that existence is not merely what it appears to be. That there is a depth to it. That sometimes, in the right conditions, exhaustion, grief, beauty, love, silence, the surface becomes briefly transparent.

You cannot hold it. This seems to be its nature.

The moment you try to describe it, it has already moved. The moment you build a ritual to summon it, the ritual is what you have, and the thing itself is somewhere else. Every religion in history has tried to institutionalise the encounter and every mystic in history has found that the encounter exceeds the institution. The church is not the sacred. The sacrament is a doorway, not the room. This is not a reason for despair. It may be the point.

What if the perpetual elusiveness is not a failure but a feature? What if the thing that will not be pinned down is precisely, structurally, the kind of thing that cannot be pinned, because to be pinned would be to become an object, and what we are talking about is not an object but a relation. A contact. A being-met. A transcendence.

You cannot frame a meeting. You can only, in the right conditions, be open enough to notice when one is happening. To see, to witness.

This is perhaps why the most reliable portals are the ones that strip away our usual defences. Physical extremity. Beauty that overwhelms. Loss that empties you. The oceanic hour before dawn. The face of someone you love. The lover’s hand held through the night. These work not because they are magic but because they are honest, they catch us before we have had time to put our ordinary selves back together, before we have had time to translate the raw fact of existence back into the familiar. Into the mundane.

The search, then, is not really a search. Not in the way you search for your keys or a proof. It is more like learning to stand in a certain kind of light. Learning to be present to what is always already present, the sheer improbable miracle of the world existing at all, and of you, this particular temporary arrangement of matter and consciousness, being briefly here in it, able to look up, able to wonder, able to feel, able to love.

The gospels. The mountain. The forest. The face of the beloved. Her hand held in the night. The sea at evening.

Different windows. The same impossible light coming through.

And the light, whatever it is, was perhaps not made for explaining. It may not be explainable to our human souls. It was made, if it was made for anything, for this: for being stood in, for being felt, briefly and gratefully, before it passes.

And leave us yearning.

Steve Robson is an impossible romantic, lapsed French literature academic, and sometime transaction banker, who divides his time between a Liverpool Street tower, arthouse cinemas, second hand bookshops and French cafés. A true believer that the unexamined life is not worth living and living proof that there is never an angst too far, he somehow manages to believe in nothing aside from a Camus inspired philosophy of human salvation and love, his hero’s passion for the beauty of an indifferent earth and more personally the élan and elegance of the Roger Federer backhand.